Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Finally...a project!!!

It's been far too long since I've had a good project. With all the crap going on with my back, surgery, injections, and now physical therapy my activity has been pretty limited. I'm been drooling over a few furniture refinishing blogs I've seen & I have about a thousand of them bookmarked, just waiting for the chance to start one when I get to feeling better. Well, last night I stumbled across a blog that got me pumped! I don't even know how I got to this blog...don't you love when that happens? You go off on a little adventure and keep clicking from one blog to another and soon you're totally sidetracked and you don't even know how you got there?! It happens to me all the time, but this time I'm sooooo thankful that it did because I found the coolest thing ever. The blog is called Full of Great Ideas and the post I found was on how to refinish a kitchen table and chairs. I was intrigued by it because the girl had almost the exact same table as I have and I've been dying to paint mine but just haven't (out of fear of ruining it or something). Here's what her table looked like before:

Mine pretty much looks exactly like that...light wood, same shape, pedestal legs. In other words...dated. It's not the ugliest dining set in the world, but it's definitely not my style. At least the blogger gal had better chairs to work with though. Mine are pretty horrendous. You'll see here in a second.

Here's what her table looked like when she was done:

And here it is with the chairs:

Amazing, right?!!! She even reupholstered the chairs too, which turned out so good, don't you think?! Just gorgeous...I love them. Everything turned out so great. So why haven't I painted my dining set? I don't know...like I said, fear of ruining it perhaps? Who knows. It's kind of a big project and it intimidated me I guess. I showed the picture to my husband last night and he thought it looked really cool too and he said "Just go for it babe." That's all the reassuring I needed! I read and re-read her tutorial a few times (which you can find here) and made a list of the supplies I'd need and headed to Home Depot with Lily. Even after I got home with my bag of supplies I had a little hesitation so I had to call my mom and make sure she thought it was a good idea too (why do I need so much reassurance over this?! I don't know). After a little more inner conflict with myself I finally decided to just "go for it" as Shayne said, and I'm so glad I did. It's nowhere near done obviously, and it's going to take a few days to complete because it requires lots of layers of paint and a lot of drying time in between, but here's what I got done today.

This is the table taken apart before I started:

Here's a bad cell phone picture of the priming process:

(I was really scared at this point!!!)

After the first layer of primer:

Wow...it's actually looking good so far!!! Maybe this wasn't a horrible idea after all.

The chairs...oh the chairs. I told you these beasts were hideous! I still don't know if the chairs are even going to look good or work with what I'm wanting to do, but I figured I'd at least try to paint them all up and see how they look. I might have to ditch them & find some other old wooden chairs at a thrift store to paint. I just can't stand all the carving and crap on them! They may or may not look good all glazed up & distressed, but they might still look too country-kitchen or whatever the heck you would call this. We shall see!

And after the first coat of primer:

Looking better though, right? Maybe they won't be so bad when I'm done with them.

And I got one more coat done before I had to put the kiddies to bed.

Yaaaaayyyy! I'm so excited for this now. Tomorrow I'm going to go pick out the black paint and get started on some color. I can't wait to see it all prettied up with a gorgeous black. I haven't quite decided if I want to do the chairs black and make some cut seat cushions for them, or if I want to do something different and paint the chairs a different color. What do YOU think? Shayne says just paint them black, but I think it might be better to do a different color so it's just not too too much black, you know? I'll have to think about it. Maybe I'll paint one chair a different color first and see how it looks. If it looks stupid then I can paint it black and no one will ever know! Great idea I just had :) I love when that happens.

Sooooo, I have another project I'm starting. I've been wanting to paint Lily's dresser for a while. It's a really really cute little white 3 drawer dresser. It's in good shape because none of the drawers are broken and there's no chips or anything cosmetically wrong with it. Once again, I was searching in blog-land and I came across another great blog here. What struck me was that the girl had the same exact dresser as Lily, except the one in the blog had 4 drawers instead of 3.

Here's Lily's dresser:

Not as horrendous as the table, right? But it still definitely needs some help! It has good bones though.

And here is the gorgeous Tiffany's inspired dresser I'm going to try to replicate:

Stunning, right? It's something I would have never thought to do, but once I saw it I just knew that I had to do this to Lily's. It's so elegant and just beautiful, and will fit in perfectly in my little lady's room!

I went and got all of the supplies for this one today too but I couldn't actually start it yet because it was raining outside :( And I don't have a garage either, and spray painting indoors is a big no no. I cannot wait to start this piece!!! When I do I will definitely be showing it off to everyone I know.

So that's what I'll be working on for the next few days. And after I'm done I'm moving on to a table that I'm so freaking excited to start on.

I've been putting it off too because I absolutely love this table and I'm just so afraid of ruining it. It's pretty as is, but could be so much better with some paint and glaze & a little distressing. I'm not sure what color I want to do yet though...maybe a bright teal color?! What do you think? Let me know and maybe I'll go with your idea. I also want to do something different with the glass (it's supposed to be used to display stuff on the inside of the table, but I don't want you to be able to see through it anymore). I thought of maybe like frosting the glass? Or even doing some stencil thingy & putting some cool fabric on the inside of it to stencil a design or something, if that even makes sense. It does in my head. Lots of ideas! I can't wait for my house to be overflowing with awesome new (old) junk.

Oooh, also, I'm getting another epidural injection in my back tomorrow, so maybe the painting will have to wait another day. But hopefully the pain will be gone for good soon and I can do more painting, sewing, and everything else! Say a prayer for me...I'd appreciate it.